Scar Flowers (30 page)

“Your life is suffocation
,” he had said. But what did he have to show for his work now?

“So you married Kim instead,” Tom had said. “Because you let the real one get away. Dude, you gotta look before you leap.”

Simon got out of bed and tossed his half-finished beer in the sink. He would go for a run. Do some situps first, until the exertion made him puke, and then he could jog a few miles. He picked up the notepad he had written on last night.
Among the scrawled notes and questions were diagrams. Floor plans. Leah’s house and yard, the gallery and smaller rooms. There was a list too, which he did not remember writing:

Restraints
—plastic or leather

Martial arts background?

Neighbors. Faith, Angel.

Dog (tranquilizer
? Collar?)

Must have a
PLAN

Monday, September 25,
9:11 a.m.

Under a rain of dogwood petals, Simon rang the bell at Leah’s gate. The sky was clear and the day hot, a rare late-summer reprieve from
gray autumn. He peered between the boards of the fence but could not see if her car was in the garage. The white dog stared from its kennel.

He returned to his rental car and read the paper. Sooner or later
, she would come out, and they would talk. A real conver-sation, not verbal sparring while he pretended to be a filmmaker interviewing a subject—she couldn’t avoid him forever.

Half an hour later, a car door slammed and a motor started. He folded his newspaper and rolled down the passenger-side window to listen. As he did, an older
-model, green Mercedes went by with a red-haired driver at the wheel. He ground the key in the ignition and followed.

A
fter a few miles he slowed to let another car in. Should he just try her at home again later? Maybe she’d been in the shower, had not heard the bell, and this wasn’t a case of her refusing to talk to him.

No, this had gone on long enough. Editing on
Babylon
would be over tomorrow, and he was due to leave Seattle in a week. He would take no chances on her eluding him again. Simon dropped to two cars behind Leah’s as traffic slowed past a con-struction site, and workers directing traffic let a panel truck in front of him.

The light chang
ed just as Leah reached the intersection, and the Mercedes slid from sight as the panel truck braked. The traffic light burned yellow, then red. Simon drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. Green: now green. The driver ahead flicked ash out the window, and the truck lumbered forward.

Leah was gone.

Simon floored the gas pedal, passed and ran the next light. A flash of green crossed his vision as the Mercedes turned left. They had reached downtown Seattle. Pedestrians, mostly tourists and people in business suits, ambled by in the crosswalk, carrying shopping bags or briefcases. Leah adjusted her rearview mirror, and Simon ducked. When the signal changed, she turned in to the Four Seasons Hotel for valet parking.

If he pulled in behind her, she might notice him. Simon cursed and took the ramp to the self-park. The ticket machine and barrier arm clicked and shuddered arthritically, and the driver in the SUV in front of him tapped his brakes as he cruised for a parking space. Simon turned
against the one-way arrow and pulled into a loading zone.

I
n the lobby, he sat near one of the enormous wooden pillars that ringed the center. A carpet the size of a basketball court, patterned with flowers and urns, soaked up light from the chandeliers. He had brought the newspaper from his car to hide behind, but there was no one around besides the desk clerk, a balding man reading a magazine, and a bellhop near the front door, a walkie-talkie in a holster at his hip.

Had he missed her? She could have ducked into one of the boutiques or even be blocks away by now. It was only a matter of time before someone would ask if they could “assist” him—he was, after all, a dark-skinned man wearing frayed, paint-stained jeans here among the pale, elegant furniture and sand-colored wood.
Buzzing the white man
is what Tom called the occasions when he had the cash to go to a fancy restaurant.
Just look ‘em in the eye and smile—they have to serve you if you have the dough
.

No one came near except the bellhop, who pushed a brass cart full of luggage for an elderly Asian couple. Just as Simon turned the page of his paper, the balding man across the lobby looked up from his magazine.

Paul Jonas.

Before Simon had time to wonder why the producer was in
Seattle, Leah emerged from the restroom and strode toward the elevators. She wore dark glasses and gripped the strap of her purse as if for support. Her hair was rolled and pinned up in back, and she wore a linen pantsuit and flat sandals. Bronze lipstick gleamed on her mouth. Paul got to his feet the moment she entered, inter-cepting her with a hand on her elbow, talking rapidly in a low voice. She straightened her arm and moved ahead of Paul as they entered the elevator and the doors slid shut.

Leah and the producer. Simon ran his eyes over the lines of
newspaper type, but all he could see was the smooth transition from Leah first meeting Paul to the elevator swallowing them up. No showy greetings or looks of surprise; that’s why she was here, to meet him. For what? To make good on Paul’s threat about
Babylon
, in case, as Faith had put it, Simon did not leave Leah in peace?

After five minutes, the desk clerk began to stare at him. If Paul and Leah were going to stay upstairs for fewer than fifteen minutes, he would miss them when they came back down, but that could not be helped. If he stayed here, he would be meeting a security guard sooner rather than later.

A block from the hotel, Simon found a clothing store, a white marble showroom where he grabbed a jacket, slacks, shirt, and shoes from the widely spaced racks.

“I’ll wear them,” he said, and asked for scissors to cut the tags.

The clerk, an Asian man with spiked blond hair, did not bat an eyelash at this five-minute shopping spree, but it was only as he signed the charge slip that Simon realized the total was over two thousand dollars.

On his way back to his car, he spotted Leah’s Mercedes in the garage. He put his old clothes into his trunk and returned to his seat by the potted palm.

His old friend the desk clerk smiled at him, apparently without realizing he was the same man who had occupied this seat minutes earlier. Simon reckoned half an hour had passed. The elevator chimes sounded, and a moment later Leah appeared. Her hair was gathered in a loose ponytail, and she walked slowly. In his surprise at seeing her he had not raised the newspaper to shield his face, but he need not have worried. Even when she emerged from the restroom, she kept her dark glasses on. As she passed, she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She stumbled slightly as she reached the door.

All her l
ipstick worn off, her hair redone. What was it Faith had said? That men got nothing sexual from Leah. Add that to the list of other lies that the girl had fed him.

Monday, September 25, 11:15 a.m.

The slam of the car door rang in her ears as Leah returned to her garage. She passed the salmon-pink rose bush, its leaves limp in the heat. Sasha stood with her paws against the side of her pen, but Leah did not have the heart to greet her.

In the square of sunlight admitted by the open front door, a white envelope lay on the floor. No address or postmark, just her name written on it. She dropped her keys and purse on the library table and opened the letter as she climbed the spiral staircase.

A whiff of Paul’s aftershave, perhaps released from a fold of her clothes, brought back a memory of the dim border of light held back by heavy hotel-room curtains. She pressed the back of her hand against her mouth against a surge of nausea.

Don’t think about it.
Babylon
should be safe now.

She read as she entered her bedroom, then let the page fall onto the bathroom floor (“You must know by now that I loved you
,” ran the words in Angel’s blunt hand.)

Angel. How she had wronged him. But wasn’t that like her?

She thought of Paul removing his jacket, pulling her close. Bile burned her throat.

She ought to feel better. What she had done with Paul
she had done to save Simon’s film. To right a wrong in ruining
Babylon
. On her knees at the sink, she caught her breath. Maybe she felt weak because she had spent the last few days in bed. No clients, no going out except to throw a ball for Sasha in the yard.

Leah
opened the cupboard under the sink. Bottles and jars, cleaning products, soap. Cool, antiseptic with the smell of bleach and paint. Her fingers closed on a bottle of rubbing alcohol and she stood. Ignoring the eyes of her reflection, she poured half of it over her hands, then filled her cupped palms and splashed her lips.

She gagged. Tears
blinded her as she twisted the tap to re-lease a gush of cold water. Her hair swung forward into the sink, a tangled spot near her face slick with a mushroom mineral damp-ness. She poured the rest of the alcohol over a fistful of it, then cut off the soiled hank with nail scissors and flushed it down the toilet.

The sour, nervous smell of him. The black hairs on his
fingers.

But
Babylon
is safe now. I’ve fixed whatever damage I did.

No, she should not blame herself for Paul’s possessiveness.
But she was the only reason that he threatened the film. Leah slammed the bathroom door. She passed her bed, with its gold-embroidered spread, down pillows, and gold-bordered gauze cur-tains; and the antique vanity, lined with rows of bottles, the silver-backed hairbrush lined up with the comb and hand mirror. Her cedar-lined closet festooned with lavender sachets.

She had to get out. Her sandals pounded the stairs as she descended in a tight circle along the vibrating metal coil of the spiral staircase, then emerged blinking in the yard. The leaves of the cottonwood tree fluttered
.

On the hotel-room bed
, she had said, “Why don’t you relax, lie down,” when Paul reached for her. Perhaps because she had not pushed his
hand away from her breast, he had dropped his guard enough to obey. A vase with a dozen red roses stood on the dresser, and beside it a bottle of champagne tilted lazily in a nest of ice. Her blackmailer had been giddy at the thought of getting his prize.

On the grass beside the front walk lay pruning shears, a brand-new shovel, and Leah’s best pair of gardening gloves, next to the wilting rose bush
that Faith was supposed to have trans-planted that morning. Leah speared the shovel into the earth.

Paul
had made it clear what he wanted. “Your beautiful mouth,” he said, and she pretended to smile in response as she undid the buttons of his shirt. “No, don’t use a condom. I’ve been tested, and I haven’t been with anyone for a year. Look, I’m trying to go easy on you. Don’t make me change my mind and ask for more. You never appreciate the things I do for you.” Later, as she leaned forward over his belt buckle, she pulled the pins from her hair so that it fell down like a curtain. She would not have to look at him.

A small rampart of soil had formed around the rose bush when she stopped to shrug off her linen jacket and toss it aside.

The shovel bit deep, and she braced her foot and pulled back on the handle. Dirt stained her sandals, settled in the creases on her toes. She had solved everything. Paul would not stand in the way of the movie’s release now. She had done it according to her plan, not his. How long he waited for her to finish undressing him, without noticing that she had only stripped down to a camisole and slacks. He let her control everything, all the while thinking that she was serving him. At first she only teased him with her hands, touched him everywhere except where he wanted her to. He did not reach out for her again—a respectful habit reinforced by her in the past with cuffs and ropes. He was in such passion that her hand on him had been enough. He had even apologized for coming too soon.

She touched her hair, then remembered
that she had cut his stain out. She had told herself,
This isn’t really sex, I’m not giving up anything of myself
, until she almost believed it.

A wave of pain crested behind her eyes, which blurred and grew hot. No, she could not just shut off her feelings. When had she lost that ability? The kiss with Simon in the tiled room, the stolen drop of his blood, surged up from memory.

She stabbed the shovel at the base of the root ball, but the rose bush did not
move. A spider dropped from the leaves to dangle from its gossamer line. Leah wiped her forehead, and the damp smell of earth welled up.

There had been a few moments of slick warmth on her fingers before he had given her a tissue. He
had said, “I thought this would make us closer, but I’m losing you.”

She had simply reminded him of his promise about Simon’s film. Did Paul truly
think that he loved her?

Maybe for him, things worked that way.

Another chunk and jab of the shovel, but the rose did not give. Leah knelt in the flowerbed. Dampness seeped through the knees of her slacks as she snipped through roots with pruning shears. Dirt wedged under her nails. A worm twisted blindly, scenting air. Glistening aphids, half-buried in their host, sucked the stems.

She had sent away the only person able to see her. Simon’s words:
Do you ever act on what you want? Or does everyone else do it for you?
Angel. She had driven him away. But this time, by going to Paul, she had done her own dirty work. Done what Simon would do: take action.

(“I haven’t wanted to interfere or change you, and I can’t offer you much,” Angel’s note had read. “But I know I deserve better.”) Good for him. An overdue letter.

Amid the drooping leaves, one fat rose still lifted its head. The bloom was almost spent. Its outer petals curled back in tricorn points, the inner clustered rows marked with small brown bruises. A sweet scent clung to it. She clipped it a foot below the blossom and laid it across her palm.

(“
It might not matter to you, but I can’t share you anymore. Things haven’t been the same since you started seeing that director,” the letter went on. “I was stupid not to have seen that, but I trusted you. Maybe I’m stupid to have trusted, but I don’t think so. You saw into me first, but I have seen into you.”)

Her lips still held the memory of Paul’s skin, her face at his groin, a taint that made her want to wash her skin again. Leah brought the rose to her parted lips and closed her eyes. A thorn tip pricked her tongue. Birds sang in the wisteria, and a lawnmower started up
next door. Dirt trickled between her sandals and the soles of her feet. She bit down hard, on the tang of blood and earth, the spicy pink smell of roses, and stifled an exclamation of pain. Hooks, sharp and green. Curved and deep.
The lips, hairline, fingers, and genitals have the greatest concentration of nerve endings
, she had once read. Her hands tore the flower stem from her mouth and she gasped, hunkered over the hole that she had dug. Her fingers closed on two handfuls of soil. Justine’s voice admonished her to keep clean, but Leah laughed and clutched at her hair, dirt raining into her clothes, falling into her mouth. She buried her face in her hands, pressed the grit and leaves against her skin in streaks of mud.

(
“I can’t see you anymore like this. Good-bye. –Angel”)